White River

Empire of Pain meets Killing Pablo in this thrilling braided narrative of two families on opposite sides of the fentanyl crisis: the sons of El Chapo fighting for succession after their father’s capture, and a Mexican-American mother devastated by the lethal flow of drugs across the southern US border—and hell-bent on revenge.

On a summer evening in 2018, one of Andrea Thomas’s daughters complained of abdominal pain and accepted half a pill from her boyfriend. Thinking she was taking oxycodone, she actually ingested a lethal dose of fentanyl. Within minutes, she was gone, leaving behind an anguished mother, an orphaned son, and a trail of evidence that snaked south into Mexico. There, a very different family had been dealing with a loss of their own: Ivan and Ovidio Guzmán, two millennial sons of the notorious narco “El Chapo,” had been racing to fill the void left in the Sinaloa Cartel after their father’s arrest and 2017 extradition to the United States. They had chosen to diversity the family’s portfolio by investing in the production of a new kind of synthetic drug—a decision whose shock waves would reshape the world, and which we are still feeling today.

The story of how a Mexican succession struggle gave rise to an American tragedy, which in turn has become one of the principal drivers of US foreign policy, White River is also the tale of the deadly cat-and-mouse game waged between the Guzmán brothers and the US and Mexican operatives who spent years hunting them down—as well as one determined American mother who would not let her child’s death go unavenged. Drawing on extensive, exclusive access to players on all sides of this kaleidoscopic story, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Drazen Jorgic reveals not just how the overdose crisis came about, but also what it has cost both countries—and how it might be stopped.